Category: Health Problems

Healthcare providers “test” for depression by asking questions about what you’re going through. Unfortunately, there’s not a blood test for depression just yet! Your doctor will ask about your mood, how you’ve been sleeping, your energy level, and if you’re eating more or less than usual. They may also recommend a test to check your

A new study that reveals the dozens of molecular changes that bring about endometrial cancer offers insight into how physicians might be able to better identify which patients will need aggressive treatment and why a common treatment is not effective for some patients. The study appears Feb. 13 in the journal Cell. Funded by the

The move toward targeted anti-cancer treatments has produced better outcomes with fewer side-effects for many breast cancer patients. But so far, advances in precision medicine haven’t reached people diagnosed with so-called triple-negative breast cancer. An innovative compound developed in the lab of Scripps Research chemist Matthew D. Disney, Ph.D., offers a new potential route to

Health officials around the world are keeping a close watch on an outbreak of a new virus in China. In response, governments are stepping up surveillance of airline passengers arriving from the affected area to try to prevent the virus from spreading. Here’s what you should know about the illnesses: WHAT IS THE DISEASE? Scientists

Federal authorities will begin screening airline travelers arriving from Wuhan, China, for signs that they may be infected with a new coronavirus that is spreading in Asia, officials announced Friday. Passengers flying into Los Angeles International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York will be examined for the

Brain imaging may one day be used to help diagnose mental health disorders—including depression and anxiety—with greater accuracy, according to a new study conducted in a large sample of youth at the University of Pennsylvania and led by Antonia Kaczkurkin, Ph.D. and Theodore Satterthwaite, MD. And knowing more about the neurobiology behind psychiatric disorders could

Zika virus infection can stunt neonatal brain development, a condition known as microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads. To determine how best to prevent and treat the viral infection, scientists first need to understand how the pathogen gets inside brain cells. Employing different approaches to answer different questions, two research teams

Pakistan says Facebook will help the country in its fight against polio after authorities blamed anti-vaccine content posted last year on the social network site for a leap in the number of cases. Pakistan is one of only three countries where polio has not been eradicated, but a years-long effort began to show fruit with

There has been a measurable decline in serious heart conditions among adult survivors of childhood cancer since the 1970s, finds a study in The BMJ today. The findings suggest that efforts to reduce exposure to the most toxic effects of anticancer treatment, including radiotherapy, seem to be working. Many adult survivors of childhood cancer are

Could feces offer hope to survivors of spinal cord injuries? It’s a question University of Alberta physical therapy researcher Karim Fouad never thought he’d ask. But the expert in spinal cord injuries said the digestive tract could help explain the link between spinal injuries and changes in mental health, such as increased anxiety and depression.

The world’s most common vision problem myopia or short/near sightedness, which causes damage to the eye and even blindness, just got easier to assess. Progressive research at Flinders University in Australia has identified a new method to measure how it affects the eye, a new article in PLOS ONE reveals. The work was based on

Employing advanced technologies that allow whole brain imaging at single-cell resolution, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that in an alcohol-dependent mouse model, the rodent brain’s functional architecture is substantially remodeled. But when deprived of alcohol, the mice displayed increased coordinated brain activity and reduced modularity compared to nondrinker or

It is easy to obtain antibiotics without prescription in retail pharmacies in China, even though selling antibiotics without a prescription conflicts with regulations, a study published in the open access journal Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control suggests. More work needs to be done to ensure that antibiotics are obtainable by subscription only, according to researchers

Children are more likely to control their immediate impulses when they and a peer rely on each other to get a reward than when they’re left to their own willpower, new research indicates. The findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers say their experiments are the first

A rapid diagnosis centre has cut waiting times for patients with non-specific symptoms who may have cancer from 84 days to 6, and costs less than current usual care if used at more than 80% of capacity, a new study by Swansea University researchers and NHS colleagues has shown. Published in the British Journal of

(HealthDay)—In a clinical guideline from the American College of Gastroenterology, published in the January issue of the American Journal of Gastroenterology, recommendations are presented for management of disorders of the hepatic and mesenteric circulation. Douglas A. Simonetto, M.D., from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and colleagues reviewed the literature to develop recommendations for disorders

A 2 degrees Celsius rise in temperatures could result in around 2,100 additional deaths from injuries every year in the United States. This is the finding of research from Imperial College London, Columbia University and Harvard University, published in the journal Nature Medicine. In the study, funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the

Studies that started in zebrafish have now pointed to a role for collagen secretion in a wide variety of clinical symptoms—and in a newly identified genetic syndrome. Ela Knapik, MD, associate professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and her colleagues discovered the syndrome caused by mutation of a single gene and named it

English and Italian speakers with dementia-related language impairment experience distinct kinds of speech and reading difficulties based on features of their native languages, according to new research by scientists at the UC San Francisco Memory and Aging Center and colleagues at the Neuroimaging Research Unit and Neurology Unit at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in

Portia Smith’s most vivid memories of her daughter’s first year are of tears. Not the baby’s. Her own. “I would just hold her and cry all day,” Smith said. At 18, Smith was caring for two children, 4-year-old Kelaiah and newborn Nelly, with little help from the partner in her abusive relationship. The circumstances were